Workers' City

Lives of Toronto’s Working People

Craig Heron

There’s a large framed print of a painting hanging at the entrance to the Bloor/Yonge subway station. I suspect few of the thousands of commuters who pass through that space every day ever notice it. It was painted in 1954 by a commercial artist named Edwin McCormick in honour of the men who built Toronto’s first subway. This piece of public art commemorating workers is relatively rare in Toronto. There is a monument to construction workers in the Cloud Gardens Park between Richmond and Temperance streets, a memorial to workers who died on the job in Simcoe Park above Front St, a stunning monument to Chinese labourers near the Rogers Centre, and a few more. On the whole, however, this is a city that has not kept alive at the public level much of the memory of the millions of working people who over the years made a living working for wages or kept house for those who did. The record of the people who built the city, made its many products, and provided its services is almost silent. This talk is about the city that workers made and worked and lived in, “The Workers’ City.”